Portal:Novels

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A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century.

Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books, web novels, and ebooks. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels. While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. (Full article...)

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Halo: Contact Harvest is a military science fiction novel by Joseph Staten. Released in October 2007, it is the fifth novel based on the Halo video game franchise. Staten was a longtime employee of Bungie, the developer of the Halo video game series; he directed the cut scenes in the video games and is a major contributor to Halo's storyline. He set out to write a novel that appealed to gamers, as well as those who had never read a Halo novel.

Set in 2525, twenty-seven years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the novel tells the story of the United Nations Space Command's first encounter with the alien collective known as the Covenant on the colony world of Harvest, and the beginning of the long war that follows. The novel is an ensemble piece, following human and alien characters. The protagonist is a young Marine, Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson, who also appears in the Halo video games. Upon release, the book was generally well received and became a New York Times bestseller in its first week. Critics pointed to the novel's success as a sign of the increasing importance of story in video games. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you have got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Shantaram

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Did you know...

...that Kurt Vonnegut's short story 2BR02B is mentioned in his later book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where it is attributed to Vonnegut's fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout?
...that My Brother, My Executioner, a 1970s novel by F. Sionil José, is a narrative about two half-brothers with opposing Filipino ideologies?
...that children's novel Nordy Bank by Sheena Porter, set in Nordy Bank on Brown Clee Hill, Shropshire, was awarded the 1964 Carnegie Medal in Literature?

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General images

The following are images from various novel-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1One of the most influential novels on the picaresque genre was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century AD. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 2J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 3Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 41474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts. (from Novel)
Image 5King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 6A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 71719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 8Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 9Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 10"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)
Image 11Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 12The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 13Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 14A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 15A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 16First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 17Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 18Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 19Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 20The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel (from Chapbook)
Image 21Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 221915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 23Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 24The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 25Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 26Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 27Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 28Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 29Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 30Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 31Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)

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